USAir Pilot Testifies He Was Warned of Danger

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--When USAir Flight 1016 flew into a down-draft during a thunderstorm, it felt as though "you were suspended from a string and somebody dropped you," a pilot testified yesterday.

First Officer James P. Hayes, who was flying the DC-9, had been warned of wind shear in the area of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. But Hayes said he had no idea he was so near the sudden, dangerous shift in wind speed and direction caused by a downward rush of cooled air.

"When I saw the rapid decrease in airspeed and felt the very severe sinking of the airplane, it was... it was... very noticeable. Something you would never forget," Hayes said. "It's as if you were suspended from a string and somebody dropped you."

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the July 2 crash, which killed 37 of the 57 people aboard.

Hayes testified that the weather turned violent so quickly that Capt. Michael R. Greenlee, who earlier was just giving commands, had to help him with the controls.

"I had my hand on the throttle," Hayes said. "Then I felt Captain Greenlee's hand on top of mine. I guess you could say we were of the same mind."

The pilots said they followed standard wind shear procedure: turning the nose up and using full power. Greenlee, 38, has 9,100 hours of flying time, while Hayes, 41, has 13,000 hours.

But neither pilot could explain why the flight data recorder indicated the nose was down. And Greenlee said he didn't remember telling Hayes "down, push it down." Hayes didn't remember him saying it either.

Cockpit voice recordings released by the Federal Aviation Administration showed that Greenlee and Hayes got two wind shear warnings but both missed an all-points wind shear alert just seconds before the crash.

The wind shear that hit the plane was one of the strongest ever recorded, a NASA aeronautics engineer, Dr. Fred Proctor, told The Charlotte Observer.

Inside the downdraft, or microburst, a wall of rain was falling at a rate of about 4 to 5 inches an hour, Proctor said Monday from his Washington, D.C., office. Winds peaked at 70 mph and shifted from head wind to tail wind in a few seconds.

"It was probably in the top 1 percent of all microbursts in terms of intensity," said Proctor, who has been simulating microbursts on computers since 1983. "It was the most intense one we had ever numerically simulated."